‘Don’t chase shiny objects’: Why less can be more in a tech stack

It’s easy to get excited by the latest tech innovations and get caught up in the possibilities of revolutionising your business; however, bolting an additional piece of tech into your system isn’t always the right choice.

Speaking at the Adviser Innovation Summit last week, Thriving Wealth founder and strategic wealth adviser John Cachia explained that practices shouldn’t “chase shiny objects”, much the same way an adviser may recommend a client not to buy a new car every year.

“The biggest thing that we do is we have a process to bring on the selected piece of tech and what value it needs to add,” Cachia said, adding that having steps in place can temper the initial emotional response.

“We go through a process as a team to say, ‘John, yes, that’s cool, but that’s going to disrupt all of this stuff.’ There’s a bit of a voting system that we use internally through the management level that approves any tech that needs to be putting on.

“But the main thing is around can we actually be more impactful with the advice that we’re giving to our clients.”

Importantly for Thriving Wealth, he said, is that they aren’t trying to be mass production of advice, looking to get “really deep and hyper personalised”, so the tech “really needs to support” this aim.

Similarly, Viola Private Wealth founder and adviser Charlie Viola added that being able create their own “systems, processes and infrastructure that really suited the high-net-worth to ultra-high-net-worth private client business” was among the main reasons the firm moved out on its own from Pitcher Partners.

“The accounting world was always a hodge-podge of systems to each other, and it created this kind of Frankenstein of systems,” Viola said.

“We just really rely now on the Microsoft ecosystem … to keep it as simple as possible. In terms of how we do everything, we have all that data flow in Fin365, so we can service clients.”

The actual tech that advisers use, he added, isn’t important to the client. What they actually care about is being able to access their information.

“We are a humanity job in lots of ways,” Viola said.

“[We need] the ability to pull together and collect their information and stack it up nice and tidily and provide it to them. So, we work really hard to make sure that we kind of get it all nice and aligned or integrated in one way, and that enables us to have good conversations with clients.”

Paring it back

Kerry Ong, general manager – customer at Iress, added that from a tech provider perspective, he has seen a shift over recent years to advisers streamlining their tech stacks.

“A lot of practices have been adding to their tech stack over the last five years, then the last couple of years, what I’ve seen is they’ve started to consolidate and review and actually strip back and simplify, back to the core values of what their business delivers,” Ong said.

“I think what I’m really finding is practices are looking at this from their business perspective, potentially, like an 80/20 rule.”

What this looks like, he said, is focusing on the tools that drive value for 80 per cent of their clients rather than focusing on the 20 per cent that might be the “bright and shiny additional tools”.

“What I’m finding is a lot of practices are now trying to simplify and really focusing back on the customer, focusing back on their value proposition and their client engagement model and how they deliver that,” Ong said.

Viola added that the key is understanding what you are trying to achieve with your tech stack.

“Keep the notes, remain compliant, get documents out to clients, make sure they know what they’ve got. All the other stuff is cool, but it’s noise,” he said.

“What we are actually trying to achieve, in terms of the actual tech stack, is simply just creating efficiency and getting information back to the client in a really, you know, government-friendly way.”

According to Ong, too much complexity in a tech stack will also make life harder for a firm’s staff as well.

“When you start to build a tech stack that becomes really complicated, it results in frustration not just with you in dealing with the customers and clients, it goes all the way down to the assistants, the associates and the paraplanners managing the data in the background,” he said.

“What we’ve found is simplifying that tech stack actually helps improve some employee engagement.”

The value of a tech stack also comes down to making sure both advisers and broader staff understand how to use it correctly, Cachia added.

“One of the big things that I know we do is around teaching our staff how to actually use technology properly,” he said.

“The reality is, you can have all this tech, but if you’re not using it properly, it becomes detrimental to you, not a superpower. One of the big things in ChatGPT is that each and every one of my staff has ChatGPT – and pro, not the free version.”

A powerful use of the AI tool, he explained, is in making statements of advice more client friendly.

“We always complain about [SOAs] being this legal documentation, but they don’t need to be legal documentation terminology. You can actually use them as a proper pathway to help people achieve their goals and inspiration,” Cachia said.

“The problem is, we don’t have too much time to do that. But now with ChatGPT, you can make a nice, very impactful document that’s a plan they put on their kitchen table and read. You can do that in ChatGPT, but you need to learn how to use it.”

Ultimately, he added, any tool that you aren’t using as a “daily function” probably doesn’t need to be part of your tech stack.